Drupal Camp Asheville 2016

I will discuss agile project management as it pertains to small and medium size Drupal shops. Agile is a buzzword in the development world but has many tools that can add efficiency and transparency to many businesses increasing customer satisfaction and accuracy to estimation.

Presentation will focus on why to use Backdrop CMS, Backdrop's committment to affordability, the various improvements over Drupal 7, and the ease of moving from D7 to Backdrop. A feature demonstration will follow a short video and slidedeck. There will be a drawing for those present for the new book -  "Beginning Backdrop CMS" by Todd Tomlinson

Avoid post-release surprises, 2 am bugs, and 'uh oh workflow' by harnessing Behat! Behat is an open source Behavior Driven Development framework for PHP that allows you to reduce human error fatigue in your testing process by writing human-readable, client-friendly tests to ensure that stuff doesn't break.

Track: Front End
Target: Advanced

Guardr is a Drupal distribution with a combination of modules and settings to enhance a Drupal application's security and availability to meet enterprise security requirements. Presentation attendees will learn about Guardr's philosophy, features, and how to start new projects with Guardr.

Commerce 2.x is still under heavy development for Drupal 8, with the most recent major merges including the full Payment API (which itself represents a major leap in functionality over what was provided in 1.x). In this session, you'll get a quick overview of the major new features in Commerce 2.x by way of a short technical demo that's sure to embarrass the presenter.

Even if you're only casually acquainted with Drupal 8, you probably know that the core upgrade path to Drupal 8 has been completely rewritten from the ground-up, using many of the concepts of the Migrate and Drupal-to-Drupal migration modules. Using the new core Migrate modules, it is possible to migrate much of a Drupal 6 (or Drupal 7) site to Drupal 8 with a minimum of fuss.

Decoupled Blocks is a javascript-framework-agnostic, progressive decoupling tool to allow custom blocks to be written by front end developers in the javascript framework of their choice, without needing to know any Drupal API's.

Before Drupal 8, changes in site configuration could only be stored and moved between environments by using the Features module. This practice was less than ideal, as Features was not originally conceived for this purpose. Since there was no other better way to manage configuration outside of the database, this became the standard practice.

In the front-end world, our responsibilities often rest upon delivering designs that look great on any screen, but the technology we use to achieve this can be a frustrating mess of awkward styles and heavy frameworks. Enter flexbox.

With flexbox, we can easily slay complicated designs without the headaches.

There are many tools out there today for hosting Drupal sites with workflow tools built in. There are also a large number of development tools showing up on the scene for local development. Lets get back to basics and learn the root of Drupal deployment from local to production.

In this session we will talk about:

Open source technologies plays a huge role in our lives as developers, most of us probably even make a living (run a business, freelancing, hobby/side projects) while using open source technologies. Open source technologies thrive from various kinds of contributions, because of that there are many ways to contribute back to open source than most people think.

UNC Asheville recently completed a 2-year project to design, develop, and implement 2 new Drupal themes for our 100+ websites. One theme was externally facing, the other an administrative theme.

In June 2016 I hiked about 50 miles of the Appalachian Trail, a 2,189 mountainous route from Georgia to Maine. Starting in March 2017 I plan to take time off from Drupal and hike the entire trail from end to end.

What does hiking have to do with Drupal? A lot more than you might think.

LeafletJS is an open source JavaScript library for building interactive maps. It is lightweight and mobile friendly, making it the leading solution for web mapping. Developers without a background in GIS (Geographic Information Systems) can rejoice in it’s simplicity, while still being able to produce complex interactive and personalized maps. Have tons of location data to plot?

Between you and your brilliant code stands... the editor. From Notepad to Eclipse - we stare them down daily. Sometimes even before coffee. Wouldn't it be nice if PhpStorm could do some of your work for you, even if it's not a caffeine replacement?

Marketing automation software allows marketers to streamline and automate repetitive marketing tasks, such as email marketing, to nurture prospects from the top of marketing funnel to sales-ready leads. Web personalization aims to tailor a digital experience for each site visitor to increase engagement and conversation rates.

Together we will review how you can write ES2015 / ES6 syntax in your Drupal application. We will learn how to run a "transpiler" in order to build backwards-compatible javascript while utilizing modern syntax. We will compare old techniques to modern techniques so you can start refactoring immediately.

Key syntax features to be discussed:

The integration of design and development is still a work in progress. The pursuit of beautiful visuals often leads to complex development demands, compounded by the need for parity with responsive, grid-based web systems. The stark differences between the two disciplines can widen the gap between the creative vision of a website and the actual achievement of it.

You may have heard of Node.js. It's the thing all the cool kids are using to build their APIs. Don't you wish there was some way you could squeeze Node.js into your theme workflow? Fear not, during this session we'll cover the following topics:

Dive into the process of adding React components as Drupal Blocks using the PDB module. Use your react component to fetch data from Drupal using GraphQL queries.

Getting started with a new Drupal 8 project?
Tired of looking up drush site-install options, unix commands or maintaining complicated bash scripts?

We’ll use object-oriented PHP instead with Robo ( http://robo.li), a task runner written in PHP that will help organize and automate repetitive commands.

Robo is easily extended with new commands and has included tasks for:

Attendees will learn how to Work with 'cool points' to create a 'smart site':

The Paragraphs module has been around since 2013 and rapidly gained acclaim for being the bomb diggity. And though Panels, Panopoly, and the In-Place Editor have long been staple ingredients in Kalamuna’s awesome-sauce, our love affair is officially over.

In this talk we'll discuss common Drupal performance issues and how to troubleshoot them. Then we’ll dive into New Relic and how to leverage this powerful tool to monitor, troubleshoot and optimize your site. In this talk you will learn how to:

This session will cover several areas on web accessibility. Web Accessibility 101 and the legal aspect for business. This talk is not specific to Drupal, but focuses on best practices that apply to any website.

Some of the accessibility 101 things I will cover are:

Angular 2 has become more popular as a solid solution for use in front end Development in recent months. In this presentation I will discuss what Angular 2 is, how you can get started quickly, and some use cases for it. This awesome framework will be a great addition to your FrontDev skill set and Drupal projects in general.